This empirical study investigates the ability of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to replicate the risk-return characteristics of their respective benchmarks accurately. By decomposing ex-post tracking performance, this study finds that the commonly used measure, tracking error, rarely sufficiently...

Individual investors select high-fee index mutual funds despite the fact that the future payouts are nearly identical. We offer an explanation for this violation of the Law of One Price based on investor desire to diversify. While diversification in some settings may be beneficial, in the case...

Using survey-based measures of mutual fund manager loss aversion, we study the effects of institutional investor preferences on their investment decisions, performance, and career outcomes. We find that managers with higher aversion to losses choose portfolios with lower downside risk, increase...

We use returns of actively managed mutual funds to document the link between accrual quality (AQ) and systematic (priced) risk. Despite compelling theoretical arguments, prior research finds no evidence that poor AQ commands a risk premium in the cross-section of realized stock returns. We argue...

This study shows that mutual fund managers vary in their reliance on category-level information, relative to firm-specific information about assets. Moreover, fund performance decreases with managers' propensity to rely on categories. Fund managers display less skill in picking stocks which are...

We study capital allocations to managers with two mutual funds, and show that investors learn about managers from their performance records. Flows into a fund are predicted by the manager's performance in his other fund, especially when he outperforms and when signals from the other fund are...

This chapter encapsulates the most recent findings on sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investment activity globally. The key research proposals addressed herein relate to the position of global SWFs among conventional and alternative asset managers, SWF allocation strategies, their recent investment...

This paper identifies a novel channel of information transfer in a common shareholder (CS) relationship, in which a shareholder of a fund management company (FMC) also has a substantial stake in a listed company held by the FMC. We find that the holdings of common shareholder–connected FMCs...

We show that poor mutual fund performance can result from agency problems that drive fund inceptions. Funds created to exploit investor irrationality have different portfolio compositions at inception, loading heavily on past winner stocks. Investors reward these funds with abnormally high...

Institutional investors, such as pensions and insurers, are typically constrained to hold enough wealth to be able to make their contractually promised payments to fund beneficiaries. This creates an additional risk in the economy, namely the risk of funding shortfall. We seek to explore the...